ROME — When it comes to looking classy on a Vespa in Rome, no one did it better than Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn in “Roman Holiday.” The classic film helped put Vespa on the map (for Americans) and gave the little scooters a romantic and stylish air, as well as permanent place in popular culture.
Sergio Caggia, founder of Nerone Tours came up with the idea of organizing Vespa tours of Rome after spending nearly a decade giving private walking tours of the city (called “Rome Made to Measure”).Mr. Caggia explained it was a conversation with a friend, who rented scooters to tourists that led him to the idea of incorporating classic Vespas and vintage cars into his own tour operations. A fan of classic cars and scooters himself, Mr. Caggia used his connections with local enthusiast clubs to find owners willing to use their vehicles to tote tourists throughout Rome.
Valerio and Stefano — the Vespa owners/drivers who would guide me and my friend, Matthew, on our tour — arrived outside our hotel promptly at 9:00 a.m. Suffering the after-effects of the previous night’s festivities, I put on a helmet and tried my best to ignore a pounding headache while hopping aboard Stefano’s 1977 Vespa.
Instinctively, I looked for handlebars, a seatbelt, or anything to grab hold of during the three-hour tour. This would be my first time on a scooter or motorcycle, and it suddenly hit me that I was about to be human cargo in Rome’s notoriously chaotic traffic.
Thankfully, Stefano took mercy on me. Zipping through traffic and between cars, the pace was fast but not frightening. Bumpy cobblestone streets became my biggest enemy. But the butterflies in my stomach eventually slowed their fluttering, as we wound our way along the banks of the Tiber River, past the remains of the Baths of Caracalla and along the Appian Way.
Frequent stops for photos at tourist hotspots, like the Coliseum and atop the Janiculum, Rome’s highest hill, provided a nice break from dicing with traffic. An extra stop for industrial-strength espresso proved the perfect remedy for my headache.
These pauses often led to amusing encounters. No sooner would we stop than camera-toting tourists would rush over for a picture. A Vespa is hardly what you’d call a rare sight in Rome. But that never seemed to matter, especially to a group of eager young French students, who insisted we pose next to the scooters in front of St. Peter’s Basilica.
The price of Vespa fame doesn’t come cheap. For two people, a three-hour tour will cost around $300. Sergio Caggia said that a similar itinerary in a classic car like a tiny Fiat 500 from the 1960s would cost roughly $400, significantly more than you’d pay for the typical double-decker bus tours. But if you want to have fun while feeling impossibly cool, it’s hard to top the view of Rome from a vintage Vespa.